Good lord, what an absolute mess of a movie. If you were going to make the Bill Clinton movie, you couldn’t get better casting than Travolta, Thompson, Billy Bob, Tierney, and Kathy Bates as the people who populated the Clinton campaign. Plus you have Mike Nichols directing, and Elaine May adapting this Joe Klein novel.
When the movie works, it’s because of the level of talent behind it. It’s more ambitious and layered than the HBO movies that have been made about the more recent political campaigns. It’s cognizant about the charms of the man, and also the fact that he’s a real fuck-brained fool.
Problem is, a few things actually. First of all, this film gets a lot more simplistic and clichéd as it goes along. It’s one thing when the idealistic new person is your POV, but the whole moral argument the film becomes, when Larry Hagman enters the picture, is bad.
Like Jesus, Mike Nichols is a king of moral arguments in film, and instead this film is like a sledgehammer to the chest. It’s based on conspiracy I guess, but it really sucks how it’s in this movie. Apparently we even had Clinton conspiracies in the 90s
I suppose the book also had this plot, so they’re just lifting it from that? You can also tell it’s bad writing though, because the original author had to stretch so hard to make it work. Picker is such a non-character, he’s a combination of four people, none of whom had even remotely a story like this.
Kathy Bates is also a combination of two people, Betsey Wright who handled a lot of his scandals and personal attacks, and Vince Foster who killed himself after Clinton became President and he worked for him for a few months. I’ll let you research Foster, but needless to say, he seems like ground zero for every deranged Clinton conspiracy theory, and he was assassinated by the Clinton’s story, or what the fuck ever.
In any case it’s all extremely bad storytelling, and it sucks how Kathy Bates is such an awesome character when she’s introduced, gay and cursing up a storm, then she’s forced to deal with this horseshit.
Speaking of characters who come off bad probably because of the book, why did they decide to make the George Stephanopoulos character, this? I don’t know why changed his race, but if it was done to add diversity, then it was done disingenuously. I just watched “The War Room,” and didn’t see very many, if any, people of color working for Clinton.
If it was changed to add a layer of race to the story, then it was done half-assed in a way it should not. But in general he’s a major element of why the story feels so clichéd, because he is so naive and idealistic he kind of comes off like an idiot.
What’s ironic is a year after this came out Stephanopoulos opened up about depression and the pressure he faced as a young man in this job. In fact he was quoted as describing Clinton as a:
“complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling.”
Now that’s a take for a character that treats him as a human being instead of a tired cliché.
But hey, they wouldn’t have known any of that because it’s one of those historical films made too close after the fact, when we have almost no sense of knowledge or perspective, and as a result they often turn out bad. Remember the Oliver Stone George W. Bush movie made while he was still in office? What about the multiple young Obama movies? My point is, capitalizing so quickly off history is for fucking morons like Dinesh D'Souza, not great artists like Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
It was only a couple months before this movie that Clinton confirmed his relations with Gennifer Flowers, and denied Lewinsky. It was afterwards Stephanopoulos wrote his book. It was two years prior that the Anonymous author of the book was revealed to be Joe Klein. Wait, two years?!? Then why do they still list that this movie was based on a book by Anonymous?!?
So there you have it, a forgotten movie that’s both better and worse than I expected. But it’s also a complete and total mess.
2/5 Stars
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